Join Invo Healthcare and our conversation with Keith Cartwright from the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) as we explore the movement away from reactive discipline, utilizing ACES as a method for guiding environments, and how you can create positive learning environments.
*Transcription was AI generated. Thank You for your patience with any complications in quality.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
We'll talk a little bit about just our background just on
our organization. So, Invo Healthcare,
we are one of the largest comprehensive providers of mental health, behavioral
supports, supportive staffing for school districts. So, we partner as a thought
partner, and then also as a great support to districts to provide qualified,
dedicated staff, whether it's in related services, OT, PT, speech, any sort of
specialty and individual with extensive experience that you need, we can
provide through our national recruitment team. And then we also have our
programmatic solutions, which is really kind of where my experience lies within
Invo Healthcare, where we focus on intensive mental health supports, behavioral
supports, integrated trauma teams. We'll talk a little bit about kind of the
implications of that or kind of our thoughts on some solutions for these root
causes today, and then diving a little bit into an introduction as well to
Keith's organization that he supports.
Keith Cartwright
Yeah, again, Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and
Developmental Services. My work happens in the Office of Behavioral Health
Wellness within that agency, but DBHDS is connected to 40 local units across
the state that we call community service boards. And again, my work is in partnership with the
community service boards, prevention teams who, and they're the ones that most
closely partner with their local school districts, whether it be through some
crisis partnerships or prevention programs. So that's kind of our model.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
Awesome. Now we'll get into the good stuff. I'll pass it to
you, Keith.
Keith Cartwright
All right. I will take it for a little bit. So today we're
really going to be talking about this movement away from reactive discipline.
And as Reagan opened up, hopefully leaving you with some alternatives to, you
know, this reactive discipline. So
really what is reactive discipline? It's this attempt to provide short-term
fixes that often can provide long-term harm. They may stop the behaviors
temporarily, but they don't teach replacement skills or, you know, this is what
we're really going to get to the heart of today, address the underlying cause.
And, you know, those underlying causes often are folks who are coming in for
various reasons. Our students come in with feelings of shame, feeling
alienated. They have trouble engaging with adults because of some of their past
experience. And so when we apply these short-term fixes, this reactive
discipline, it often increases the likelihood of repeating the behaviors we're
trying to prevent with our responses. There's, we know that there's
disproportionate impacts of students of color, students with disabilities, and
students from low-income backgrounds. They are disciplined at higher rates for
similar behaviors. So reactive discipline, you know, kind of summary, increases
inequities. It reinforces trauma responses. And it really, you know, this is a
big one, fails to build our student capacity to manage their behaviors
effectively. So we're going to do a
little bit of what we're going to call a root cause analysis. And anytime when
I'm talking about root cause analysis and with our prevention work that really
looks like, you know, we deal a lot with preventing addictions and substance
misuse, which to me is not unrelated to how do we prevent challenging behaviors
in a classroom. Our work has shifted thinking to, okay, we see the behavior,
but what are the stories beneath this behavior we're seeing? And to me, that's
kind of the same as this. Let's get to the root cause of this. So we're going
to kind of go through this, do our own little root cause analysis and together,
if anybody wants to participate in that.
But we start with this problem statement that there are high rates of
reactive discipline and inequitable outcomes among students. It's one thing to
say that, but the story is deeper than that. And so it kind of prompts us to
let's explore that a little bit. So curiosity is one of my favorite words. I
know Reagan and I talked yesterday and we shared this sort of curiosity, but
that's really what it is. We have this problem, but let's get curious about it.
And that kind of starts with why are
students being disciplined more frequently and unfairly? And I'll throw that
out there. If there's anybody who wants to respond to that, I think you have
the capacity to unmute. I will tell you, we won't have a lot of time to discuss
the answers, but certainly want to hear if anybody has ideas. And if not, I
will certainly be whipping through these answers as we go through this
analysis.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
When I can contribute to, you know, I think when we talk
about reactive discipline, you know, it's the way that the system is set up is
that it doesn't leave many other alternatives, right, whether it's suspension,
expulsion. We know certain, you know, special education students are, you know,
limited in the number of days that they can receive that as it presents as a
manifestation, right, of their disability.
However, we know there's a lot of behaviors are manifestations of
everything. And so how can we think about that for, you know, all students,
regardless.
Keith Cartwright
Well, why are students being disciplined more frequently and
unfairly? Because students are exhibiting disruptive or maladaptive behaviors
in the classroom. And we talk about this a lot of time that a lot of our
students are. And I say this when we speak a lot, that a lot of our students
develop, their brains develop, their behaviors develop in order to survive in
the environments that they're grown up in, which doesn't always equal behaviors
that will thrive in a classroom setting. So they come with behaviors that
really don't fit into the classroom. But
it's not because they have this bad development. It's because their behaviors
have developed to survive something that doesn't look like home. And that's the
classroom in a lot of ways. So the next question is, well then, why are
students exhibiting disruptive or maladaptive behaviors? And I sort of answered
that, but not really. Anybody. Because they struggle with emotional regulation
and managing stress or frustration. So again, they come from spaces, and with
our students particularly, who are having challenging behaviors. They come from
spaces where they probably have been very emotional, might be angry, might be
frustrated. But in spaces where there hadn't been somebody who's helped them
navigate those emotions in a healthy way that would help them adapt in a way
that would help their behaviors be more suitable for the environments that
they're in. So why are students
struggling with emotional regulation and stress management? Because the school
environment lacks consistent evidence based behavioral supports and proactive
strategies rooted in behavioral science. And to me, this next question then is
really important, because that's a truth. But why do the school environments
lack consistent behavioral supports and proactive strategies? Because the
school relies on punitive and reactive discipline rather than implementing
trauma-informed behavior based interventions that address root causes. And so why is that? This really gets to the
heart of it. We all want to do what's best for the students. So we're not being
reactive with our punishments because we don't want to do what's best with the
students. But when there is underlying trauma that we're just not familiar
with, and that's what we're talking about when we talk about adverse childhood
experiences, when that's not being adequately recognized or addressed through a
systems-level behavior science-informed approach. And as we go around Virginia,
there are still an awful lot of schools and communities in general who, when we
start talking about adverse childhood experiences, it's the first time that
they've really had this discussion. And when you're left with your only option
right now is addressing the behavior. When there are root causes and stories beneath
the behaviors, that's a pretty big piece that's being left out, especially when
it comes to helping our young people and when it comes to increasing our levels
of compassion and empathy for what some of the things that our folks have been
through.
Keith Cartwright
So root cause analysis, then getting all the way through it,
underlying trauma and adverse childhood experiences combined with a lack of
trauma-informed and behavior science-based supports in the school environment
are driving students' behavioral challenges and leading to an equitable,
reactive discipline. So I'm gonna read
this slide. I know you all can, but I'm gonna read it for us. Root cause
analysis, let's be honest, our current systems are not built for equity. And
that's really rooted in this idea that when we start talking about the root
causes, and a lot of those root causes are a reflection of home environments
that are a reflection of community environments. So if we have our young people
growing up in communities where there is a lot of violence going on, where
there is poverty going on, where there's systemic racism, there are stressors,
there are challenges in those communities that challenge our young people.
challenge their emotions. And then when you partner that, what there aren't
really systems or people in place helping them figure out how to navigate that.
There aren't resources. They're going to bring those emotions to school. And
again, many times they're reflections of systems and neighborhoods that look
very different from some of our other students' systems and neighborhoods. So
these disparities aren't just about behavior. They do reflect implicit bias.
They reflect systemic structures that criminalize emotional expression. A lot
of the things that our young people are expressing are very appropriate for
what they're going through. But when we confront them for that, when we punish
them for that, we can make them feel ashamed of something very real in their
life that they are going through. Discipline policies that remove students from
the classroom often ignore the root cause. And that might be unmet mental
health needs, unaddressed trauma or inconsistent classroom expectations. So
again, a lot of times when we address the behavior and the behavior really
wasn't the problem. And the way we address that behavior is to expel students
or remove them for a period of time. I often say that that's kind of hoping for
some magic dust to be sprinkled and there's a cure to something through absence
that isn't going to happen because what's really absent is addressing what the
student is really going through. You all have heard this, you're all educators.
All behavior is trying to tell us something. The challenge is we don't spend a
lot of time trying to figure out what that something is. We address the
behavior without the curiosity of where this is coming from. Now on the screen
is one of my personal heroes, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris now.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
Me too.
Keith Cartwright
Yes. Dr. Harris, it was the first Surgeon General of the
state of California, where she did some amazing work around adverse childhood
experiences. She actually put in legislation in the state of California that
all young people would be screened for ACEs. And her story with this was that
she was diagnosing a lot of young people with ADHD. She's a pediatrician. But
the more she got to talking with these young people who had been diagnosed and
placed on medicine for ADHD, the more she started talking to them, there was
some common ground. And that was, they all had experienced some really hard
childhoods. And then she stumbled upon the original adverse childhood
experience of study, did a TED Talk that I firmly believe, and this was, I
don't know, 15 years ago now. I believe that we probably wouldn't be having the
kind of conversations we're having today at the level we're having them if it
hadn't been for her TED Talk. The ACEs
study was eye-opening when you talk about a study that said what happens to you
early in life has some real implications on your behaviors and your health
later on. That was mind-blowing. But it took Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and her
TED Talk, and you can Google it if you haven't seen it. I strongly encourage
it. Reagan and I were talking about this yesterday, one of my favorite lines,
and then a whole TED Talk, she gets very curious, and she says this in her TED
Talk, about what the hell is in the well. And that really is just a strong way
of saying what is the root cause, like what is the root cause analysis of, you
know, what these young people with ADHD were experiencing, but all sorts of
health and behavior challenges. And that original adverse childhood experience
of study, you know, I could, and Reagan, we could talk for a whole day about
that study itself. We don't have a whole day, but in summary, it was really
these two doctors were, both one of them was working in an obesity clinic, the
other was doing some work around heart disease, and just in some conversations
with folks, discovered that they all were experiencing or had experienced some
significant childhood trauma. So they got curious, is the stories of the
general public, do they look and sound like the stories of these folks that we
are working with? They really started to just theorize that we think what
happens to people, what they experience in the earliest days of their life,
that has some implications on their weight loss journeys. It has some
implications on the risk of them smoking cigarettes and, you know, all that goes
with nicotine and tobacco. So they just, and one of them happened to be a part
of the Kaiser Permanente health care plan, so they had access to a lot of
people to do a very big study, about 17,000 people. And lo and behold, what
they found out was indeed, the more those 17,000 people, the more adversity
they experienced in childhood, the more likely it was that they were going to
have challenges down the road.
Keith Cartwright
And you can see in the slide what some of those are. So
students with four plus aces, two and a half times more likely to fail a grade,
four times more likely to have severe behavioral issues, and 32 times more
likely to have learning and behavioral problems. So what this tells us is that the root cause,
what the hell is in the well, what has happened to our young people early in
life, doesn't disappear when they come into the classroom. A lot of the stuff
that I always say, every student, every employee, everybody shows up with their
whole life with them. And turns out for a lot of people, the fact that they're
bringing the early pieces of their life with them can make that very
challenging. So the brain behavior connection, to me, this was the biggest, like
when we started getting into why is this, the brain became the big connection
to me, because again, our young people. 80 to 90% of our brain develops in the
first five years of our life, and it develops in response to the kind of
experiences we have. So if we have harsh experiences in those early brain
development phases of our life, emotional regulation becomes very challenging,
impulse control becomes very challenging, attention and executive functioning,
forming healthy relationships. And we spend a lot of time in Virginia honing in
on this one, because if you grow up in a harsh environment, our brain wires to
protect ourselves from relationships more than it wires us to connect with
relationships. So it makes young people very distrusting, very avoidant of
relationships. And when you're a teacher
and you know in the classroom, the thing that's going to help me teach somebody
the best is a healthy relationship. And there are young people coming in
predisposed to not wanting to be in relationship. That's very challenging. So
students can't learn if they are stuck in survival mode. I heard somebody, an
educator recently say the best learning happens in the context of the best
connection and that best connection he defined as just this place where I feel
safe in the midst of this connection and a lot of our young people don't. So traditional punitive discipline
exacerbates stress and reinforces negative patterns. Reactive discipline fails
trauma-affected students. Because again, we're going to respond to the
behaviors we see, but not be real curious about what those behaviors are
telling us about, often what they've been through. So ACEs are not just a
clinical concern. They are a leadership issue. Schools are often the first line
of response and how we lead determines whether we perpetuate harm or disrupt
it. And again, you know, there's a lot
of things, and I know Reagan's going to talk about this as we go on, there's a
lot of things a school can do to set a tone that says this is more than the
behavior. Maslow's hierarchy here, like having these conversations looks at
this in a whole new way in my eyes. And Reagan and I were talking about this
yesterday. If you look at a lot of these things in this hierarchy of needs, you
know, safety on there, like safety for a lot of our students who've experienced
ACEs is the opposite of the ACEs.
Keith Cartwright
ACEs in their life meant they never felt safe. So if they go
into an environment that's promoting a safe climate, they're actually getting
the opposite of ACEs. And to me, the opposite of ACEs is healing. And I think that's the beauty of our schools.
When we talk about they have our kids for so long and each day, they really
have this opportunity to bring healing to our kids. When we talk about their
esteem, when we talk about celebrations. A lot of our young people have never
been celebrated. Like they've never had their accomplishments, the things that
they're doing in a home on a daily basis. Some might point out that this is a
wonderful thing you're doing. So when they go into a school classroom and they
get a good grade and somebody just, you know, applauds that, a lot of our kids
will be taken completely off guard by that because it's the opposite of what
they have experienced. So this hierarchy
of needs for me is a great opportunity to set a climate in our schools. And
it's a great place when we start talking about leaders. How do we establish a
setting that is healing and educating? I think this is a great place to start.
And I think this is a great place for you to start, right, Regan?
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
Yeah, no, absolutely. I am gonna pop back for one quick sec.
I just thought of something. You know, when we look at the initial Maslow's
hierarchy of needs, so if you were to Google Maslow's hierarchy of needs,
there's a separate one that's not just a school-based version. It's just for
human beings in general, how we all have these same needs. And it's the same
foundational, you know, pieces, and then the top is self-actualization. So it's
very similar to this. What's interesting is that studies have shown that that
level of self-actualization actually has to be achieved before there's actual
learning potential. And I think that's a really important piece, is that when
we think of the challenges students are facing at home, whether it's, whether
they're, you know, they overheard their parents concerned about how they're
gonna pay the electric bill or how they're going to pay rent, whether they are
in a home where they saw, you know, their parent, you know, domestic violence,
and they witnessed that, and there's the confusion there. The concept or the
idea that they will be able to sit in a seat and truly comprehend and learn an
algebraic equation is, it just, it's, it doesn't make sense, right? And so we really have to think about how
schools can build this capacity. And when we think about that, the first thing
and the fastest thing, right, is the actual school environment. And I think
when we talk about safety, safety can take on, you know, many different things
like our scissors put away in kindergarten class or, you know, we have security
and we have clearances at the front of the school. We make sure that every
adult on campus is background checked. We do all these things. That's not the
safety that we're referring to. We're discussing vulnerability, the safety of
emotional safety, of feeling comfortable, of feeling accepted, no matter what
behaviors or choices you may make, right? Aside from those zero tolerance
offenses that, you know, for safety reasons we have to consider, but the
classroom environment is a high impact fix.
So we know trauma history can be complex. It can be, you know, decades
and sometimes of, you know, at least a decade when we're supporting older
students. So we know that the likelihood of quickly changing that trauma or
wiping that trauma clean or eradicating the effects of trauma, that takes time
and that takes persistence. But the
fastest thing that we can do, you can even do it in your schools tomorrow, is
focus on the actual environment. And that's one of those foundational pieces,
you know, to that level of learning potential, right? And, you know, I think
it's really important. We support a lot of districts, but one district in
particular, we actually provide therapeutic classroom support.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
So we come in and we have a team of mental health
clinicians, behavior analysts, paras, the teacher, that are all specifically
trained, but in that particular environment, the students there are the most
intensive students that I've probably seen in my career, even as a psychologist
prior to working at IMBO, their behaviors were extremely intense and actually
was visiting one of the classrooms on one of the very first days that we kind
of launched the program. And in those first few days, there was a particular
student that got really upset because he was denied access to his phone. And it
sounded like historically in other classrooms, it was almost used as a
pacifier, if you will, for lack of a better term of, you can access your phone,
even though that's against the rules, you can access your phone. So to come
into an environment where that was no longer, you know, the expectation, he
didn't quite respond well. He flipped desks over and as he flipped a desk over,
all the other students in the class became flipping, you know, begin flipping
the desk over. And I'll never forget, we walked out of the classroom and they
were like, okay, he needs to de-escalate. He needs to go to calming room. So as
we're walking in the hall, he's like, I'm gonna get suspended, that's fine.
That's what I wanted anyways. Like, I just wanna go home. I can be on my phone,
you know? And I was like, no, no, no, I wanna send talk to you. And I was like,
oh my gosh. And I approached the conversation, not with one of like peanut, but
I was like, you know, I just noticed something when you were in the classroom.
And he's like, what? I was like, you made a bad choice, but everyone followed
your bad choice. Like, you're the leader of that classroom. He's like, wait,
what do you mean? I was like, you're the leader of that classroom. That's what
I just observed from that. So how are you going to lead and let's make this
right? And so he went back in, he turned the desk over, he apologized, he asked
his classmates to apologize. Anyway, it's a great success story. He's actually
graduated and he is going to college and he's on track, he wants to be a
pharmacist. So really great story. But
the point is that in those moments, they're so used to that response. And a lot
of times the function of these challenging behaviors that schools are seeing
are for that response, it's to escape or avoid. Either escape or avoid the
environment or escape avoid a task. So it's really important that there are
ways that we can quickly adjust the environment to where it can either
currently and maybe triggering the student, but how can we create an
environment that is calming? And those small adjustments can actually create
immediate improvements. And I think it begins with the concepts of teachers.
And I think my mother and my grandmother are both school teachers, my grandma's
retired.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
I remember dinnertime conversations with them, continued
conversations with them about the expectation that they are truly experts in
all things related to child development. And as amazing like super women as
they are, we know the expectation of what they're expected to do and what they
were trained to do. There's a significant gap, right? And often teachers are expected to manage
behavior effectively, address emotional and behavioral challenges, create a
structured environment and then support students with complex trauma and
emotional needs. But in reality, a heavy focus of that training is focused on
instructional content, right? Lesson planning that's all focused on the
academic environment. And just like all of us, if we have a medical condition
and we go to a doctor, they refer us out to specialists, right? They attend a
medical school, they have all the knowledge, but at the end of the day, they
understand that sometimes they need special attention, they need special
answers, special understanding. And I think that's no different than the
academic environment. Sometimes we have to think through how we can partner or
how we can best fill in that gap for educators.
And what we found is, we strongly believe obviously in the importance of
mental health, but there's also a component of behavior change that's
associated with mental health therapy and clinical interventions. But there's
actually a whole science to behavior that often schools don't discuss. And part
of that is through the concept of applied behavior analysis. So working here at
MO, I work with a great team of board certified behavior analysts, I call them
behavior scientists, but they truly are experts in the science of behavior. And
there's studies that are done. These are some common BF Skinner, Pavlov, you
may have heard of Pavlov's dogs, very popular Albert Bandura and social
learning theory. John Watson, these are all very well-known behaviorists that
really drove and created these systems and this research of applied behavior
analysis. And truly administrators, teachers, even student service
professionals aren't trained in a couple key components of how environmental
design can shape student behavior, how reinforcement systems influence
engagement and motivation. And when we
think of... know, common classroom practices, clip charts, class dojo, you
know, all these things that are reinforcement tools. Are the teachers truly
trained in the science behind these things? Or are they aimlessly clipping up
and adding a point because they feel that that's what should, that's what they
should do? And is that clip or the dojo point going to be reinforcement enough
for those students? And is a clip down or a loss of point going to truly
trigger a student that may just be desperate for some positive relationship? So
there's, there's components of that. Looking at how trauma and ACEs affect
emotional regulation, but not just emotional regulation, executive functioning.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
And I think that's a really important piece here. When it
comes to the academic environment, executive functioning is extremely
important. Initiating tasks, completing tasks, organizing tasks, organizing
thoughts, all of these things that require such intensive focus and
attention. I don't know about you guys.
I like had talked to Keith yesterday and made the joke. Working from home is a
new experience, but even in schools, before I can truly like focus and sit down,
my desk needs to be wiped down. I need to have a coffee. I need my space to be
in a certain state. And what's great is that as an adult, I can control that.
Students don't get to pick how their environment often looks, how it's created,
what they can escape or go to. They're usually bound to a specific location.
And so just thinking of and empathizing with the fact that they're executive
functioning skills, it may look different for every student, but there are some
basic things that I think we all need to be able to sustain focus and feel productive. And then also looking at proactive strategies
to, in utilizing this to prevent disruptions and increase participation. So
it's not just about those students that are engaging in intensive disruptive
behavior. It's also the thought of how do we get the whole classroom engaged in
building those relationships, which we know is so, so important for the healing
journey for these children who've experienced trauma. And here we'll, you know, I think Celia or
the team, we can share this deck with you guys as well. Please, you know,
following, feel free to share. There's just some components here of just going
through some specific research studies that, that, you know, supports this,
right? Supporting the environment, supporting behavior science, and using the
application of that next level, you know, of intensity of intervention design
in the school classroom. So I'll flip through these. And one thing I wanted to
talk about today, and the point of me bringing this up is just to specifically
identify that when we're talking about the environment, it's not how the desks
are laid up. It's not the policy of rules and procedures being posted. It's not
that simple. There's actually a lot of components to the environment that are
just often overlooked. And as amazing as positive PBIS is, as amazing as social
emotional learning curriculum, these kids need something more. And I think the
fact that even through large scale implementations of PBIS, through large scale
implementations of SEL, behaviors are still greater than ever on campuses
across the country. So we know that
there is, there's a subset of students that are seeing, are not getting the
intensity that they need through those interventions. And so just like we look
at tier three academic or tier three, you know, behavioral interventions, we
need to really, really look at what are some things that we can employ across
all of our classrooms, you know, to support students.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
And so when we look at intentional classroom design, we look
at scientific interventions, we look at, you know, instructional delivery and
pedagogy, it's extremely important because for us, we believe so strongly in
these things that we actually created something that we call the assessment of
the behavior learning environment. And what it looks at is it looks at 200
strategies across six different pillars. But the point that I definitely want
to kind of hone in here is that there's so many things that teachers can do to
create and support that environment. So
looking at class wide supports, these are just some examples of our standards,
rules and expectations, we know it's important that if we are allowed to do
something one day, we're allowed to do something the next day, right? That is
just, you know, kind of common knowledge, routines, we know are extremely
important visuals, I think all of these things are core components. And I think
what teachers truly feel are, you know, required. But what we're looking also
looking at is how do we actively respond to students? What are those active
student responses? What is that positive specific praise ratio for every single
student in that classroom? It's amazing how a five-second you are special, you
can do this, I know you've struggled in the past, I feel great about this
today, or I know you had some challenges today, tomorrow's a new day, you've
got this. Just how powerful that can be for a student relationship, just a few
seconds per day for every student. So
really looking at that specific praise. Looking at class-wide reinforcement,
when we're using clip charts, when we're using reinforcement strategies, is
there a science to it? Are we really looking at intervals in the time frame in
which teachers are reinforcing students? Are we looking at how they're
operationally defining? Is there one particular student that is getting
reinforced for a behavior and another student is engaging in that same behavior
and they're not getting reinforced? Think of a student that had experienced
abandonment trauma, right? They didn't feel seen, they didn't feel heard and
next thing you know four out of you know four classmates are getting reinforced
for something that they're trying their hardest to demonstrate, how discouraging
that would feel and how likely they would feel disengaged or they would present
in a behavior to escape or avoid that environment or that task. And looking at
the data collection methods, I know this is always difficult in schools is
figuring out the right balance for teachers to collect that data but are there
systematic ways and there are to do that you know without limited disruption.
And then we talk a little bit about ecological design, looking at safety
measures, the availability of reinforcers, what are focus enhancements within
the classroom, looking at layout and functional space within that classroom
environment.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
But I think the one that definitely I wanted to include here
is our pillar regarding you know instructional delivery. This isn't just the
classroom looking and presenting in a certain way, reinforcing and providing
praise and all the things that are environmental. It's also in how the
instruction is delivered to students that's extremely important. We're looking
at the relevance of tasks, the difficulty of tasks, the length of tasks, very
teaching method, are we using visually supported instruction, are there
understanding checks and is there a promotion of choice within the environment
that's extremely important. And I think
choices is a great concept when we talk about changing behavior and you know
this is a silly story but it is relevant. I remember as a child I would throw
tantrums in the morning because my great grandmother would pick these outfits
out for me and I did not want to wear the bows, I did not want to wear the
ruffles. It was World War III every single morning and in her age she figured
it out. She would lay out three outfits for me. All of a sudden I felt that I
had won this battle, that I am in charge, I am picking my outfits, but at the
end of the day those were structured choices that she provided. And I think
it's important for teachers to incorporate that promotion of choice but they
need help in layering how this works.
And I think the important piece here is you know we can sit in
professional development day after day. I could read a book on how to play
basketball and I would step out on a court and have no idea where to begin.
Which hand, which layup and what's going to happen in the moment is I'm going
to resort to what's most comfortable. And that's not the teacher's faults,
right? When they're in a crisis environment or students disrupting the
classroom, they're going to go to the strategies that have worked in the moment
because maybe the idea of trying something new feels scary. And so that is the
extreme, you know, the importance here is really looking at building job-embedded
coaching for those teachers and how to employ these strategies. They need someone to show them, they need
someone to demonstrate it. And I think as leaders the beautiful thing is your
ability to fill in that gap for them. not only so that they feel confident,
because you also have to think too, your teachers may also have a history of
ACES, right? It may be that they are so passionate about this career and
they're working in education because a teacher in their childhood changed their
life and made them say, you know what, I want to be a teacher, I want to be an
educator because Miss Jones in fifth grade told me that I could do this and now
I want to return that favor to students. So we also have to think that teachers
have this desire to do well and if they're not doing well by student, if
they're triggering the student, it's the same concept and principle that we
apply to students.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
It's not willful misconduct. It's going to a survival mode
and teachers are in survival mode often in the classroom and so I think as
leaders, the importance of job-embedded coaching is really looking at action
research cycles and how you can embed that coaching and investing in your
teacher capacity and teacher training. They are on the front line of response.
They are leading that classroom environment and it's important to say like we
need to change the system, not the student. We shouldn't be engaging in any
punitive or reactive discipline for students if these foundational pillars are
not even accessible to them. That's not fair, right? And so I think as leaders, it's the
opportunity to say, you know what, let's look at what environment we're
actually providing. Let's look at the strategies. Let's invest in our teacher
capacity. Let's build environments that regulate before they punish. Let's use
data for support, not for surveillance, not to say, you know, oh man, we got to
get the six weeks of data because we want this student to be identified as
special education. We need to demonstrate their behaviors so that they can go
to a smaller classroom and stop disrupting the learning of others. We need to
look at that and say, how can we utilize this data to make better choices? And,
you know, using your power to shift, whether it's funding allocations, looking
at ways to invest in PD, but also there, you know, we're here to support. I
know Keith, myself, you know, Celia, you can reach out to us. We are happy to
be thought partners and brainstorm ways that you could incorporate this on your
campus. You're not alone, you know, but sometimes you do as leaders and even
myself have to call in someone else for opinion, for an outside perspective.
And so we definitely are open to being those thought partners for you. And, you know, just here, you know, Keith and
I have brainstormed, obviously collaborated on this, but we wanted to touch a
little bit on the utilization of current resources because I think a lot of times
as we're having these discussions, school leaders saying, well, I have a social
worker, I have a psychologist, I have a school counselor, you know, they're
working with students, you know, it's, you can easily look at the statistics
that the ratio of students to student service professionals across the country
is just wild, right? There's not enough to go around. They're not getting the intensive support.
Some of your student service staff, as amazing as they are, aren't trained in
clinical intensive interventions that some of these students may need. Their
training may not have included school-based environmental, you know, changes.
And often, I think the struggle here is that every department or every
professional often works in silos. And Keith, I don't know if you want to jump
in and provide some perspective as well. But when we look at collaboration, we
see that as a precondition for integration.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
It's amazing to know what this person is doing, to
collaborate on a goal, to collaborate on an idea. But there's a concept of
everyone working on the same goals. That's really, really important. And Keith, I'll pass it here to you.
Keith Cartwright
And I would say that's been, in Virginia, that's been the
greatest impact of this work that we've been doing for the last decade. I
remember when I first learned about ACEs myself and started doing some research
about how can we grow this in Virginia. And I found this organization ACE
interface. I reached out, gauge whether they could come do some training with
this. And I'll never forget, it's the most prophetic thing. Professionally,
anybody's ever said, Laura Porter, who's part of ACE interface said to me, she
said, Keith, like I did your stuff in the state of Washington for 15 years,
trying to prevent underage drinking, cannabis use, blah, blah, blah. She said
we would hold town halls, conversations about those particular initiatives and
nobody would ever show up. She said, but once we started talking about ACEs,
once we started talking about root causes, everybody showed up. We didn't have
room to hold these conversations. And that's what we have seen in
Virginia. And because if you're all
starting to teachers, our prevention folks, law enforcement, when we all can
identify this one thing that we all can agree on that we want to start
impacting and in our world it is, these ACEs, powerful things start to happen.
One big program and it's national, but we're doing it heavy and Virginia is
handled with care. And so we train law enforcement officers to understand the
implications of when they come up on a crisis situation where a young person is
involved, they have been trained to understand ACEs and what this may mean to
them going to school the next day. And before this child shows up in the
classroom the next day, somebody in the school has been notified. They don't
get the details, but they just have been notified. This young person
experienced adversity the day before so that everybody can be prepared to do
all of the things that Reagan just pointed out. And so it's law enforcement in
our schools, not just collaborating, but they're integrating the systems they
use to help their community and help the students. So this one to me is very,
very powerful and systems changes throughout the state.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
And I think it's important to kind of keep to your point of
like everyone understanding what the common goal is. And I think in education,
and particularly in special education, we also kind of always run into some
difficulties because when you look at a student's IEP document, they have
speech goals, they have OT goals, they have PT goals, they have mental health
goals. And typically that team gets together for any new review, they talk
about the progress, but there's not a cross training session where the speech
language pathologist is training the teacher on strategies they're using so
they can use that in the classroom where the PT is maybe not able to provide
the teacher or isn't providing the teacher with them strategies they're working
on, the mental health goals, we're not saying like, oh, we're promoting this
strategy, let's make sure we're promoting that in the classroom. And so there's
just a breakdown there. And what we've
seen is just, even for us and just kind of talk through a little bit about what
we found is that integration is extremely important. And so, for us at MO, we
created, because of that passion for that, we created a multidisciplinary
program that is an integrated, so it's called INVO's integrated
multidisciplinary program to address childhood trauma, hence why I call it
impact long name, but it is along that premise, right? Where you are bringing
together mental health professionals, these behavior scientists, BCBAs that I
talked about, and they together are creating an integrated treatment plan where
deploying behavior specialists into the classroom environment. We're really
thinking through those pieces to really look at data and look at that
significance. We take into account their trauma history. And so, at a
school-based level as educators, it's thinking through systems like this, how
to take your existing student service staff and support in their integration of
goals and data tracking that's extremely important. And we found it to be
extremely effective. Here, I just wanted
to show some visibility. This was for this school year, for thousands of
students that we service. For every student, we collect their ACE score, and
we're able to look at the prevalence. So, across the students, across the
country, we're currently servicing. This is the prevalence. This is what's in
the well, right? And we're able to look at this at a school-based level, at a
community level, at a district level. And the nice thing is our team members
actually have access in real time to this because in order to be
trauma-informed, you have to actually know what the trauma is. And as amazing
as trauma-informed practices are, I think they are amazing. But truly, there's
some questions that school district staff can't ask families. And to really
understand the implications or experiences of that student's trauma, maybe
their parents' experience of trauma, we see that be generational in the home,
it's really hard to guide those interventions.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
So, as leaders, I definitely challenge you to think about
ways that you can dive deeper into what's in the well at your school so that
these strategies can truly be a trauma-informed reflection of the community and
the families and students that you're servicing. As you can see here, 52% of
the students that we support across the country have experienced emotional
abuse. I mean, when you look at these statistics, your heart goes out, right?
You've got 21% of physical abuse. And every single school and district leader
that we meet with to show them this data, sometimes they're appalled. Like, are you serious? Your tier three
students that we're surveying or the students that you referred, this is their
prevalence, and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm looking here at what's in the
well. 66% of my students have experienced parent separation or divorce. We
should run some groups, some support groups for our students that are going
through this. How can we brainstorm? 40, you're just making up a number, but in
some cases, I remember me with the principal and 60% had an incarcerated
household member. She's like, I had no idea. Should we run some groups for
these students to help build those relationships and build those supports? So
it's really looking and utilizing and asking that question, what's in the well
to drive that? And then it's asking
what's in the well, but it's also saying, well, how are the interventions
working, right? It's not making an intervention change and doing that. And so,
you know, these are processes and these are systems that have to be created.
Again, Keith, myself, we're happy to brainstorm at your particular campus and
challenges and brainstorm ways that you can capture this data. But for us, you
know, what we look at is we're looking at clinical progress and we're not
looking at just one piece. We know trauma affects students in a multitude and
it's multifaceted, it's very complex. So
it's looking at anxiety, elopement, grief and loss symptoms, you know, verbal
aggression, physical aggression. So it's not just behavioral manifestations,
it's intrinsic as well. And I know we've talked a lot of time today about
students that are exhibiting intensive extrinsic behaviors, but they're
students that are in those AP classes that are perfectionists that are
struggling just as much. It's just not outwardly exposed. And so how do we
truly equip teachers to be able to pay attention to those signs as well? Because more often than not, those students
that are exhibiting those external behaviors are the ones that are there. So
the point is that it's truly looking at the complex layers, it's pilling back
the onion for every single student. As Keith mentioned, it's that curiosity,
right, of root causes, it's really understanding, oh, sorry, yep, it's understanding
those root causes. It's looking at science, you know, I know a lot of
instructors and I actually went down a little rabbit hole last week in the
science of reading, like super fascinating. And I think it's awesome and it's
like such a gift to be able to teach someone to read, but it's complex, it's
not easy.
Reagan Rogers, M.S., Psy.S
And, you know, when you think through mental health and
behavioral supports, there's a science to it. It's not just SEL, it's not just
deep breathing, it's not just class dojo, it's not PBIS, it's much, much deeper
and more complex than that. But once you create a system that builds and that
lever is consistently pulled, then you have created something really beautiful
on your campus to support these students. And then the importance of not just
doing something and saying we did it, but making sure and following and data
collecting and building a system so that you can look at program evaluation.
You know, if you're investing in resources, I know at a school district level,
it's really important to report those outcomes. But at the same time that those
outcomes are reported, they should be absorbed and the individuals that are
working with these students directly should see those results, not just to
reinforce the amazing difficult work that they're doing, but to make sure that
those students are truly receiving what is prescriptive for them
individually. And it's gonna look vastly
different for every single student. And just kind of getting into those next
steps, you know, as Dr. Nadine Burke Harris says, you know, Keith and I are
idle. Definitely recommend watching that TED Talk. It's I can quote some parts.
I've watched it so many times, but it's so powerful. I recommend showing it to
your staff to raise their awareness. I know a lot of administrators have, have
watched that or I've watched that a lot of times. They're like, Oh my gosh, I
have to send this to my team today. I encourage you in your next staff meeting,
show that video. I really, really think, you know, it would be eyeopening. But
a quote that she said is the single most powerful tool we have to address ACEs
is the safe, stable, nurturing relationship of just one adult, just one. And what if that relationship was every
adult? And what if that system was your school that provides that? So
definitely appreciate your time today. I know Keith, if you have any last
pieces as well, we do have just some contact information here. We do have a
feedback survey as well. I would love your, your thoughts on the content
